54

“[B]ut the forest was everywhere, rolled over hill and valley in billows of interminable green, – a leafy maze, a mystery of shade, a universal hiding place, where murder might lurk unseen at the victim’s side, and Nature seemed formed to nurse the mind with wild and dark imaginings. The detail of blood is set down in the untutored words of those who saw and felt it. But there was a suffering that had no record, – the mortal fear of women and children in the solitude of their wilderness homes, haunted, waking and sleeping, with nightmares of horror that were but the forecast of an imminent reality.”